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Thug
Thugs are workers specialized in the dark side of the trade business, and thus one of the many ways the player interacts with the community. Their functions include defending your shop from other players' attacks, as well as directly threatening and compromising nearby players (or rival shopkeepers) through spying, vandalizing, theft, and intimidation. They become available for hiring after the newbie protection status is lifted off but become worthwhile only at much higher levels. (Unless you want to go for the Thugs Achievements, its not advisable to get a thug until you are at least a shopkeeper level 30-40, if not later, when you can easily afford him.) Thugs who offer their services at your shop have their levels based on your shop level. Generally speaking, the most offered thug levels range between 35 and 60% of your shop level. However, sometimes they go as low as 15% of your shop level and reports have been confirmed that 92% of your shop level is also offered once. The thug, as other crafters, comes with learning and cooperation skills. It is rumored that the cooperation skill gives a bonus to the defense, against other thugs, for members in your guild. The learning skills seem a bit distorted because other workers tend to be able to increase a lot more in skill than a thug does on average. Tasks All these tasks require real-time waiting. It is not needed to be online for the thug to continue his tasks. He will, however, not actually finish his task until the player (most importantly: you or your target) logs in again. The significance is that, while gone, the thug supposedly offers no protection. Guild protection, though, still seems to apply. Except for spying, should one of these tasks succeed, then it is not possible to take further action against that same target again for 36 real-time hours (or is it only 24?). (The ban against further action is not initiated by spying itself, but, the ban does include further spying.) There are two types of failures: simple failure, and prison. In prison, the thug presumably continues to offer no protection to the shop. Moreover, the name of that shop is revealed to the target and the target's guild. Spying: If successful, it will be easier to perform other thug tasks on the target shop, such as vandalizing, for a (long) set period of time. You will also get a summary of the enemy playing time, money, some of their goods in store (biggest and/or most valuable stacks?), some of their recipes (highest priced?), the workers and their level. Spying takes about 10 real-time minutes. Any of the following actions will prevent you from attacking the target for at least 1 real-time day. (Or is it 36 real-time hours?) They are also locked until later levels, which is an additional important reason to wait to hire a thug until later levels (besides the simple fact that thugs are not cost-effective early on). If desired, the locks can be removed by tokens, individually. Also, the starter packs unlock various thug actions. Vandalizing: (Unlock at level 15) If successful, you will gain more customers (and questers?) for 1 game day. In addition, some (one?) of the target's improvements will be damaged, requiring gold (and improvement points?) to fix. This takes longer than spying to complete, but not nearly so long as burglary (how long? ~1 hour?). (The old negative effect may also apply: The target will lose customers for 1 game day.) If improvement points are required to fix damaged improvements then this could indeed be a very damaging action to inflict upon enemies. The positive bonus is not especially significant, unless one is in the unusual situation where playing out one game day per thug action is feasible/fun. Intimidating: (Unlock at level 25) If successful, your workers' stats are enhanced by 25% for 1 game day. In addition, the target's workers lose morale. This also takes longer than spying but much less than burglary, in real-time, to complete (1% per hour, so about 100 hours total or 10 days). (The old negative effect may still apply: a direct reduction of the target's workers' stats by 25% for 1 game day.) Morale loss is recovered by giving effected workers time off or leveling them --- or hiring new ones. Both actual recovery options do not recover large amounts of morale: Repeated intimidation could really damage an enemy. As with vandalism, the positive bonus is not especially significant for most. 'Burglary: '(Unlock at level 40) If successful, you will steal 2-10% of the target's gold or 1 (random?) stack of the target's items. Rare materials be stolen! Burglary takes about 5 real time hours. Observe (from the screenshot) that successful theft is, as in real life, anonymous. There are no caps: one can gain/lose much more than the 1.2 million shown in the picture. Supposing one had a stack of 3 (or 30, or 300, ...) gungnirs, one could lose all of them. Maintaining a diversity of inventory may offer some protection against losing particularly valuable stacks (if indeed the stack chosen is as simple as a uniformly random choice). (Is the thug really such a terrible thief that he would walk away with a single dagger from a top ten player?) The surer defense is, of course, to just sell off valuable inventory. At a certain range of levels, unlike vandalism/intimidation, burglary offers both a feasible and significant positive effect. Which is the reason that hiring a thug becomes eventually necessary for everyone --- if only as defense against burglary. Notes Thug actions themselves are only occasionally significant and/or fun. There are a number of achievements specific to taking thug actions. Given the enhanced negative effects of vandalism and intimidation, it seems that the most effective way for a league of players to actually aim at a mortal blow would be to use those actions as much as possible on the target --- and the target's guild. If one can lower morale and active improvements sufficiently, and then clear out their capital and stock, one might actually be able to expose a target to a real risk of bankruptcy (or at least force firing of workers, and/or leaving guild, and/or moving to the outskirts, and/or spending tokens to survive). Given that any individual suffers from a 24 or 36 hour wait period concerning any specific target, this is, however, very difficult to pull off unless the enemy in question has managed to raise the ire of a great many players. In truth, thugs are simply not that effective at deliberately landing significant wounds upon enemies. Nonetheless it is, eventually, vital to have a thug for defense. Otherwise one has in effect painted a large sign on the shop: "Rob me!". The greatest significance of thugs (besides defense) is as in the picture above, specifically in the range of levels from around 100 to perhaps as high as 300: stealing millions from players that, apparently, have such little use of money that they have tens of millions on hand. That is, the significance is when the person doing the stealing can still use the money while the target cannot. After successful theft one wants to, of course, actually do something with the money, lest it simply be stolen back (by the target or others). Chiefly: buy an improvement. At the very highest levels, one could also be fighting over the relevant top ten list. With a significant amount of hassle and coordination one can gift money to guildmates by deliberately letting friendly thugs in at prearranged time(s). In the end, though, the bottle-neck of far greatest significance is actually carpentry improvement points. Money is only vital at the lowest levels, where thugs are anyways not cost-effective. For that matter, even with guildmates offering to allow one to rob them, that ability is only viable at level 40 or by having spent tokens. At which point, in either case, bankruptcy is no longer a real concern and money is not the bottle-neck to advancing. One should not confuse thug employees with the special NPC thug that demands 2k goldVandalism insurance(Quest) and later 20k goldIntimidation insurance(Quest) from you. The NPC is a special quest line offered by the game, and is not the result of the actions of other players. In particular it is recommended that one pay, although reports suggest that perhaps this is the unique quest line where not paying could be a good choice. Prison When the thug fails a task, he is sent to prison where he remains for a set amount of time (Real time). If he is found while performing a steal operation, he will remain there for 4 gamedays or several real hours in jail (starting only after you logged in when the thug finishes his set attack and is imprisoned), you can bail him out for 100 tokens. Prison penalties for spying, vandalizing and intimidating are less. The thug's salary is not paid while he is in prison. A thug can be replaced by a newly hired thug while in prison. While there is a chance to fail an attack without getting detected (no information is given to the defender to whom attacked) when a thug is sent to prison the username of the attacker always gets revealed. Category:Workers Category:Thug